Your Love is Showing

I sat here this AM, as I would guess many of you did, watching Senator Clinton give the speech that filled our hearts with love for the Women's Movement, our legacy, her work and OUR bright future as American Women.  Here are a couple of my favorite lines:

• “You can be so proud that from now on it will be …, unremarkable to think that a woman can be president of the United states and that is truly remarkable.”
• "If we can blast 50 women into space, we put a woman in the White House."
  "The glass ceiling got about 18 million cracks in it."   
• "Every moment looking back keeps us from moving forward"

To all of my older sisters, you paved this road.  Your unflappable requirement that humanity recognize gender equality made this moment happen.  To all of my younger sisters, you were at the reading of the will and now the legacy is yours; handle it with care, strength and the desire to make it spread to a point of being natural.  I am so proud today to be an American woman.

Then, in my email inbox, from a friend this arrived ~ Your Whiteness is Showing; Open Letter to White Women Threatening to Not Support Obama.  by Tim Wise.  Here is the opening,

This is an open letter to those white women who, despite their proclamations of progressivism, and supposedly because of their commitment to feminism, are threatening to withhold support from Barack Obama in November. You know who you are.

First, for those of you threatening to actually vote for John McCain and to oppose Senator Obama, or to stay home in November and thereby increase the likelihood of McCain winning and Obama losing (despite the fact that the latter's policy platform is virtually identical to Clinton's while the former's clearly is not), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...
MORE....

My response

I am white.  I am fat.  I am almost 60.  I am a Democrat.  I am a Feminist.
None of these words are a negative.
My whiteness, my fat, my age, my party, my feminism is showing.
As well as my conscience.

To say my whiteness is showing, as if whiteness is a pejorative is not right.  I am not ashamed of my race.  It is simply a fact  -  like my height or shoe size.  It is behavior which is subject to scrutiny and, even then, labels serve no purpose but to dramatize and routinize difference with no bridges. 

I love color.  I love aging.  I love. 
That is all that matters.
I hope one day, people will say, “Your love is showing.”   

Comments

[Chelsea]

Well said, Zoe. Your love IS showing.

[Dave]

Your love is beautiful. I find it interesting (and troubling) that we human beings believe we can intuit each other's deepest hopes and fears and make attributions to their behavior. We love to demonize, don't we...?

I was in DC on Saturday and witnessed the "race for the cure." 10s of thousands of women (and some men) sharing their love, their courage, their griefs and their sorrows. There is much love and beauty in the world...